Commercial Response
After the tour was announced, the first two shows at Wembley Stadium in London sold-out at a then record-breaking time of 18 hours and 9 minutes for 144,000 tickets. However around 10,000 concert tickets were still left unsold for her Leeds concert. Madonna's concert in Paris in front of 130,000 fans remains to this date, her biggest concert audience ever and largest crowd of any concert in French history. A concert was also planned in Basel, Switzerland for August 31, 1987, but negotiations between Madonna's management and local organizers failed due to the high fee (U.S. $1 million) that Madonna's camp demanded. As a result Nice, France was booked in the itinerary. But when a local mayor threatened to cancel the concert, citing crowd problem, Jacques Chirac, then Mayor of Paris, stepped in to overrule him. Her first-ever Italian concert in Turin, was presented by the Italian state broadcaster RaiUno and broadcast around the world. Just in Italy, the show was watched by around 14 million households. The show at Turin was watched by 65,000 fans and was a record there.
In Japan, a thousand troops had to restrain a crowd of 25,000 fans seeking to greet Madonna at the airport. When severe storms forced the cancellation of her first shows, despondent fans nearly rioted, and Madonna was confronted with out-of-control teenagers soaking themselves in the rain outside the stadium. Promoters had no choice but to refund U.S. $7 million to ticket-buyers. Madonna's Madison Square Garden show in New York City was an AIDS benefit with all the proceeds from the show going to American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR). She dedicated her performance of "Live to Tell" to her late friend Martin Burgoyne, the designer of her 1983 "Burning Up" single cover sleeve. Upon completion, the tour was the second top female concert tour of 1987, behind Tina Turner's Break Every Rule Tour, earning in total of U.S. $25 million according to Pollstar and playing in front of 1.5 million audience all over the world.
Read more about this topic: Who's That Girl World Tour
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